An Open Letter to Bob McEwen: Run in the 6th District
To Bob McEwen: Your US Senate candidacy consideration (6th paragraph), though somewhat clever, is fooling almost no one.
As Project Logic noted, John Mitchel, who took 23% of the primary vote against George Voinovich in 2004 (even before George became a crybaby over John Bolton), is already in the Republican primary race against Mike DeWine. Your entry would splinter the field (a phrase that was a favorite of yours during the 2nd District primary last spring), and ensure a Mike DeWine primary victory.
If you really think politics is in your blood, the place you should be is Ohio’s 6th District:
- It’s an open seat, as current occupant Ted Strickland has announced a gubernatorial run.
- Since it’s an open seat, your evangelical friends James Dobson, Don Wildmon, and Tony Perkins, and the Ohio Restoration Project ministers you’ve been glad-handing for the past few months, can campaign for you without looking like the complete fools they would indeed be if they supported you in the 2nd District against current Congresswoman Jean Schmidt, who for all her supposed faults is as prolife and pro-family values as almost any Republican in Southern Ohio. The same goes for your Republican buddies from the “good old days,” the Council for National Policy types like Ed Meese, Jack Kemp, and Paul Weyrich.
- Of course, if they were honest and fair, the national values leaders and heroes from the past just mentioned would evaluate the other conservative candidates in the 6th District before deciding to support you. But if they were honest and fair, they would have done that in the 2nd District this past spring, and they didn’t.
- Strickland ran unopposed in 2004, and his GOP opponents only got 40% of the vote in 2000 and 2002. The chances that you will have a strong Republican primary challenger appear to be pretty low. If they catch wind of the fact that you’ve got Dobson and the old GOP crew behind you, they may fold without a fight.
- Though it has pockets of Democratic voters, the 6th should by all rights be almost as reliably Republican as the 2nd. It’s only your House Bank scandal-driven loss to Strickland in 1992 (scroll about halfway down) plus 2000’s redistricting that cemented Strickland into his 6th District perch. Additionally, the 6th District may actually be more receptive to the endorsements of the evangelicals and the oldtime Reaganites than the 2nd.
- At least a small part of the 6th was in “your” old district of yesteryear (half of Scioto county, and perhaps a small sliver of Athens County), so your claim to be coming back home to serve would be barely credible, just as it was in the 2nd this spring. Of course, you’ll have to buy a place in Marietta or another town in the district to make it look like you live there, but that’s no big deal. This time, you’ll be able to say you’ve lived in “your” district a whole six months instead of two.
- The national party may support you if you get through the 6th District primary, since winning the 6th would represent a pickup for the Congressional majority.
- If you ultimately win, you get the satisfaction of taking the seat currently held by the guy (Strickland) who ended your congressional career in 1992.
- George Bush and Karl Rove may hem and haw for a bit, but in the end they’ll support Jean Schmidt for reelection in the 2nd District, making an upset by a challenger, especially one with more baggage than a sold-out Boeing 747, that much more difficult.
- It’s possible that the people who were so opposed to your primary candidacy earlier this year might not be as concerned about your representing the 6th District, where the talent pool appears thin, as they were about your parachuting into the 2nd earlier this year, when there were at least three credible, credentialed, deserving, and resident conservatives already competing.
- Then again, one never knows what sort of information might surface from the Federal Trade Commission or FBI about a certain business opportunity you have been involved with for the past 15 years or so (y’know, the one that has such a “good name” that it now operates under another name, so the original name doesn’t have to be mentioned). Well, that’s a risk you’ve obviously been willing to take no matter what office you happen to be running for.
Nearly 75% of GOP voters of the 2nd District sent a clear message in June that they didn’t want to be represented by a 12-years gone, foreign-company and foreign-government lobbying, financial disclosure game-playing, multilevel marketing (and possibly pyramid-scheming), House Bank Scandalizing (4th paragraph), two-time losing (now 3), still-Virginia-residing (publicly available listing) carpetbagger, who, against Emily Post’s rules of etiquette and common sense, can’t stop calling himself “Congressman.”
Maybe the voters of the 6th District will be more receptive and forgiving.
So the suggestion from here is this: Take your loyal followers, and your currently dormant all-purpose blog, and go east, old man. Go east.
BizzyBlog to McEwen: Go east, old man.
Bizzy Blog has an excellent post up that suggests Bob McEwen should run for Congress in the 6th District that Ted Strickland is leaving behind.
He lists quite a few very solid points as to why this would be a good move for McEwen, even if he can’t…
Trackback by Project LOGIC — October 18, 2005 @ 2:21 pm
Note to attempted commenter SamIAm, who among other things would not leave an e-mail addy:
My name is Tom or Thomas; that is how you address me, unless you want to be called SammyIammy.
If you want to write a post the length of a book, start your own blog. I’ve only allowed one long post like that, and it was a mistake. Your points can be very easily refuted.
I’m a better public speaker than McEwen, and I’m not that good. On objective public speaking standards, he was mediocre on June 3rd at the primary forum, and he was the fourth or fifth best speaker at the Ohio Restoration Project Meeting in late August. Whatever he had once is long gone.
As to motivation, it’s this simple–I remember, I don’t like being betrayed, I won’t be fooled again, nor will I, if I can help it, allow others to be.
Besides, I just said he may be acceptable in the 6th. Be happy. :-)
BizzyBlog
Comment by TBlumer — October 19, 2005 @ 6:54 pm
Oh Tom. It’s really sad that you don’t want to discuss the real merits of your beef with McEwen.
Tell me, exactly how is it that you believe he violated your trust? As I said before, the House Bank issue is the most overblown bit of nonsense ever to be called a scandal.
I’d be surprised if you could possibly explain just what it is - precisely - that you have a problem with. And please, don’t rely on 15 year old newspaper quotes and baseless allegations. Give me some cold hard facts.
Also, just out of curiosity, aside from the few folks who are interested in the political side of your blog, does anyone really read it? My guess is that now that OH-02 is over, your readership consists of me, Viking Spirit, ProjectLogic, OH-02, the Whistleblower and maybe Jean’s campaign manager, Joe “Dean of Corn” Braun.
Am I right? (BTW, when counting up your “hits” be sure to subtract all the ones that are your own).
Comment by SamIAm — October 19, 2005 @ 9:19 pm
#3, SamIAm:
So much ignorance, so little time. Enjoy the single post you’ll be allowed here on the topic of McEwen (which had to be edited to eliminate immature name-calling), and this response, which will be the last time I should ever have to deconstruct Bob McEwen. Maybe you’ll learn something.
Since your language of choice appears to be condescension, let’s start with this: They’re called links, SamIAm. Y’know, those underlined thingies in the 3rd-last paragraph you have so much trouble with. You click on them and get taken to pages containing explanations. I assume that you need practice with that, which is why I’m providing answers in this comment too.
Now that I have your attention:
– The House Bank Scandal was especially egregious for McEwen because he initially denied any overdrafts, said there might have been a few, and then there were 166 (yes, I was following the Wall Street Journal’s lonely pursuit of the Scandal at the time, and those are “cold hard facts”). Additionally, in the initial stages of the breaking scandal, he was with those who wanted to obstruct the investigation, until it became obvious that voter outrage was too overwhelming to be placated (another “cold hard fact”). The lying-through-his-teeth denials and the initial obstruction were actually worse than the overdrafts, which were bad enough. I don’t forget things like that; hell hath no fury like a trusting voter lied to.
Follow this link (remember to click) and you’ll get a sense of the betrayal I conveyed to another blogger in early June:
Here
A part of the e-mail he didn’t post was this:
___________________
Even with all that, if Bob had moved back here, settled into private life, or local politics, worked his way up, demonstrated that he’s a new guy, etc., I’d be inclined to cut him slack, because his positions on the issues are predominantly on-target. But he didn’t do that; he’s played the Washington insider game (and hasn’t been here) as a lobbyist, consultant, speechmaker, ….. He’s become at least reasonably affluent and possibly pretty rich guy ….. I don’t mind people getting rich when they build a business….. but his riches have come from playing the politics game. It’s legitimate to ask if he’s elected whether he’ll represent his Washington insider friends or us. Of course, we don’t know for sure, and I don’t want to find out. But given the fact that outsiders are making highly-publicized endorsements (and) that Bob is wrapping himself around them ….. I think we all have a right to doubt where his loyalties will be, and (because of) that we should vote for someone else (local) with similar positions on the issues.
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– As to financial disclosure, something you mentioned in the pathetic comment I won’t post, Bob refused to account for what he has done in the last 12 years, as if we have no right to even ask. Sorry, if you’ve been gone 12 years and all of a sudden want to represent me, you owe me that, and 2nd District voters must have agreed.
– Similarly, he would not answer questions about his lobbying. It’s unacceptable for someone seeking elective office to expect voters to be left in the dark on these matters and still pull the lever for him. Was he lobbying for foreign companies and governments to make it easier to move jobs overseas? The Chinese-”former PRC Government” person at his firm at least makes me wonder. I’m personally aware of a company that may have to shut down and put 120 people on the street because a big American company customer is bound and determined to do business with a Chinese-PRC company, even though the cost difference is almost zero. I think American lobbyist-enablers are making this easier. So sue me for caring about American jobs and workers.
– As to Amway/Quixtar, like the lobbying, don’t the voters have a right to know what someone who has been gone for 12 years has been doing? And do you think P&G employees still smarting from being accused of working for a Satanist company might care that Bob has been and still is an AQ person?
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Finally, as to your (of course) condescending comments about traffic: you have no idea how foolish you look. After you practice clicking through to the fuller explanations above, you might want to click at the bottom of the blogroll on the right and look at Alexa and Technorati. Failing that, off the top of my head I’ll just tell you that I’ve received thousands of hits from that midget blogger known as Instapundit on three different occasions; hundreds of hits on multiple occasions from Michelle Malkin, Volokh, Anchoress, and Betsy’s Page; and hundreds of hits at least once from Hugh Hewitt, Michael Barone, Radio Equalizer, and probably a dozen other blogs you might recognize if you didn’t spend your time obsessing over supposedly powerliess little old me.
And all of the locals you mentioned may or may not have had similar traffic experiences. More importantly, though, all of us are in the arena of ideas, occasionally making a difference, instead of destructively heckling from the sidelines like you. Except here, where you are now known as SpamIAm, are no longer welcome, and will receive no further responses.
Buh-bye.
Comment by TBlumer — October 20, 2005 @ 10:09 am